Oxford’s Protestant Spy: The Controversial Career of Charles Golightly (review)

Charles Golightly (1807–85) has hitherto been known to scholarship merely as a somewhat shadowy figure in the wings of numerous studies of the nineteenth-century Church of England. In this impressive monograph Andrew Atherstone, for the first time, places Golightly center stage, tracing his career as a stalwart opponent of the Oxford and ritualist movements from the 1830s to the 1870s.

Golightly was an ordained Anglican priest, but inherited private means that meant that, apart from serving a curacy in Kent in the early 1830s, he had no need to obtain regular paid employment. Instead in 1835 he acquired a house in Oxford, where he had been a student, and devoted the remainder of his life to upholding the cause of conservative Protestantism in that university, city, and diocese. Golightly was especially influential at the pivotal period that followed the publication of John Henry Newman’s notorious Tract 90 in 1841, leading up to the subsequent conversions to Roman Catholicism of Newman, William Ward, and others. At later dates, from the 1850s to the 1870s, Golightly campaigned energetically against the advance of ritualism in the Diocese of Oxford, which he believed to be centered on the new theological college founded at Cuddesdon by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. He also vigorously opposed the advance of liberal theological ideas as represented in the 1830s by Renn Dickson Hampden and in the 1850s by Benjamin Jowett.

Despite the appearance of this book in the very useful Paternoster series of Studies in Evangelical History and Thought, Atherstone is clear that Golightly, who had Huguenot ancestry and significant affinities to traditional Anglican highchurchmanship, is better classified as a Protestant than as an Evangelical. Indeed, he first came to prominence as a leading promoter of the Martyrs Memorial erected in the center of Oxford in the early 1840s to commemorate the Protestant bishops burned at the stake in the reign of Queen Mary I. The Martyrs Memorial was a product of the widespread anti-Catholicism of the 1830s, initially conceived primarily as a demonstration against Rome rather than the Oxford Tractarians. Golightly’s subsequent campaigns were similarly motivated by his intense suspicion of Rome and his consequent determination to resist perceived Catholic subversion of the Church of England.

Golightly’s opponents readily dismissed him as a busybody and a trouble-maker, but he was nevertheless a highly effective agitator. Arguably he acted as a brake on the Catholic movement in Anglicanism; certainly he highlighted and reinforced the internal tensions in the mid-Victorian Church of England. Even at the end of this book, its subject remains something of an enigma, a reportedly “kind” man who destroyed his own friendships and divided his church in the single-minded pursuit of his controversial preoccupations. However, in bringing us as close as we are ever likely to get to a rounded appreciation of Golightly himself, Atherstone has also significantly enhanced understanding of the complex internal dynamics of Victorian Anglicanism, anti-Catholicism, and antiritualism in nineteenth-century England.